Twinkies were fine, but the cards were better

I confess there was some sadness when I learned this week that Hostess was filing for bankruptcy.

It's not a love for Twinkies, you understand. I haven't enjoyed one in years.

But from 1975 to 1979, I'd rush to the Twinkies section of Dan's Supreme and Pathmark to turn over box after box, scanning the bottom for elusive Mets. There were cards issued in 1993, too, but that was different. We'll get to that.

But during the Topps baseball card monopoly, the company issued one set of cards. That's different from today, when the company also seems to have a monopoly but issues many, many sets.

But back in the 1970s, the only other cards out there were linked to the occasional food items, printed on the bottom of the box.

It wasn't easy to find the Mets. It was an epic search.

Consider that there 150 cards in the sets. These were some of the Mets “quiet years,” so there were not many of our players in the sets. There were three cards to a box. It's not like there were unlimited of Twinkies boxes.

On a great day, Mom needed something on the store when the shelves were stocked, and I could overturn the entire display searching for Tom Seaver, who was always the priority, or other Mets.

There were some difficult choices. Buying multiple boxes was not an option. And the stock was picked through pretty quickly given all the Mets fans in Massapequa Park.


On the bright side, I could make purchases confidently since the cards were plainly visible on the box bottoms. I didn't have to buy a box merely hoping that Bud Harrelson was nestled under a “golden sponge cake with creamy frosting inside.”

Let's look at each year's cards, starting with the 1975 set. The design in as plain as can be, which stood in sharp contrast to that year's wildly colored Topps issue.




The Seaver card is, of course, spectacular, even with the tape marks. Cut me some slack, I was 11.

I also rounded up a Harrelson and a John Milner. Tom and Buddy were snapped in spring training, and Milner has the beautiful Shea batter's eye in the background.

The Staub card was acquired later. Two years ago it was the subject of some magnificent sleuthing by my friends in the Crane Pool Forum.



I wondered if this was just the worst case of airbrushing ever. Topps back in the day would paint uniforms on traded players. And sometimes, well, let's just say no one was fooled.

There was a long-suspected photo connection between Hostess and Topps.

Note that the Expos logo is still clearly visable on Rusty’s chest. Topps often would leave collar trim in plain view, but never an entire team logo.

Then it appears an artist started adding Mets pinstripes on Rusty’s unstriped Expos jersey, then got distracted and stopped.

And keep in mind, this card is from 1975. Rusty was traded to the Mets at the start of the 1972 season.

Crane Pool Forum poster batmgadanleadoff offered a theory that maked great sense.

Rusty, it is known, had some kind of beef with Topps, because his cards do not appear in the 1972 and 1973 sets. His first Mets card is in the 1974 issue.

His guess is that the screwup with the Expos "elb" logo and pinstriping was not an artist's oversight, but that the photo was supposed to be cropped higher up, at around Staub's neck and through the shoulder line.

“I've seen several proofs of old Topps cards where the cap or helmet was airbrushed to reflect the player's brand new team,” he wrote. “In those proofs, the jersey top (former team) was left unaltered. The final card was cropped above the jersey.”

That makes sense to me. And I was convinced when the fine people behind the Ultimate Mets Database created this mock-up of what an air-brushed 1972 Topps Staub card might have looked like.


There are no such horror with the 1976 set, which we'll tackle next.

Epic pursuit of 1971 Topps set comes down to Jon Matlack, Ted Martinez and Rick Folkers

Jon Matlack and Ted Martinez were players on the 1973 N.L. Champion Mets, and Rich Folkers was forever one of those players in the small photos in the back of the yearbooks on the “On the Way to Shea” page.

But together they played an important role in a milestone event in my card collecting career – completing the magnificent 1971 Topps baseball set.

Will and I headed to the National Sports Collectors Convention last weekend, an event we’ve attend and covered on and off since we joined forces and formed the cardboard crusaders in the early 1990s, dispensing our wisdom and generally annoying dealers in our weekly Flint Journal sports column.

We both long ago moved on to other jobs, but continued the hobby we embraced as kids, and an opportunity to cover the largest card show in the country as it appeared in Chicago was not to be missed.

And any epic journey must include adventures. We endured coming face-to-face with former Yankee and known Hall-of-Fame autograph ball abuser Reggie Jackson, rogue security guards, disorganized dealers, Diet Coke depravation and traumatic accidental iPhone separation. We barely lived to tell this tale.

We made out way to the convention center, located in the shadow of O'Hare Airport.

Anyway, the completing the 1971 set has been a collecting target since the mid-1990s. My goal is to complete a Topps base set run from 1970 through the present. I’ve had the 1973 issue – the first cards I started purchasing on my own as a kid -- in hand since the early 1990s. But I’ve been chipping away at the other three ever since.

They’re special sets. Topps went through dreadful design doldrums in the late 1960s, recycling design elements and even photos. But in 1970, someone at the company must have remembered that baseball cards are supposed to be really cool.

The 1970 set is a fine return to form, but the 1971 issue made it seem as if someone told the designers to throw away the rule book.

That concept was ratcheted up one more notch in 1972, a fantastic series of pure 1970s pop art. The Tom Seaver card from that set has been declared The Greatest Card Ever.

The 1971 issue was an important step to get there. With its black borders and back-of- the card photos, it was unlike any previous issue. And Topps for the first time made extensive use of action photos. Some are considered classics because they look like they were snapped from the stands, and I don’t mean the expensive seats, either.

Four players and an umpire are on this card, and we have to assume that one of them is Buddy Harrelson.


And it was a set that I needed to build entirely from scratch, having gathered none of the cards as a kid. The mission became more difficult as weekend mall shows became scarce and the remaining cards dwindled to harder-to-find high numbers and short prints. I’d pick up a card here or there, but the pace certainly slowed in the last decade.

So I headed to Chicago with my list of 13 cards needed to complete the 1971 set, along with the 48 1972s and many more 1970s. You bring such lists because you just never know when you might stumble upon a magical 10-cent bin.

Arriving Saturday afternoon, we made a quick pass of the show, which, while not the overwhelming experience it was at the height of the hobby’s popularity, is still pretty huge.

The challenge of a show this big is that you’ll see things you need, things you want and things that you never even knew existed. Focus is important for a budget-minded collector, like me.

We did find three cards on the list quickly, before finding some old friends who operate a family friendly card show back in our old stomping grounds of Grand Blanc. Catching up at his booth, we noticed a minor commotion across the aisle.

It seems that Reggie Jackson, the strikeout prone former Yankee, was admiring one of his old Oakland jerseys that was on display. I noticed that the people running the booth didn’t let Reggie touch anything there. We know from personal experience that Jackson can’t be trusted with prized artifacts. We kept our distance.

We returned extra early Sunday morning, battling misinformed and overzealous security personnel who did not appreciate the important role of the media in the collecting hobby, or, apparently, the rules of the show.

We already were on edge after realizing that the iPhone, the essential tether to the outside world, was accidently left charging on an end table at Will’s apartment. This was a crisis of unimaginable proportions. The previous record for iPhone separation was about 42 minutes, and that was a very, very long 42 minutes. It was a dark time, and I don’t want to dwell on it.

Now we were to be separated for most of the day, unable to call, tweet, email or otherwise connect with the outside world for almost the whole day. Unthinkable.

Starting the day under this dark cloud, we attacked the show. Will had already scouted out some potential tables for me, writing down their locations.

I scored three of the cards within the first 20 minutes, then bounced around to several more dealers, finding two here and three there, crossing off numbers and player names as I went along.

Finally, I was down to two cards. One was No. 559 is American League Rookies with Terry Cox, Bill Gogolewski and Gary Jones. Because the Yankees are always seeking to make life difficult for me, cards of their players are usually more expensive and a little harder to find. Jones, sadly for him, will always bear the stain of being a Yankee.

The other was far more enjoyable, but posed a greater problem. No. 648 is Mets Rookie Stars, featuring Matlack, Martinez and Folkers.

Matlack, of course, was part of the Mets fearsome mound trio that included Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. He was a future rookie of the year and a three-time All-Star, even sharing MVP honors in the 1975 game. Plus, his middle name is Trumpbour , which is cool.

Martinez was a nice-fielding utility player who played in five seasons for the Mets.

Folkers was a former first-round draft pick who had a cup of coffee with the Mets in in 1970, but spent all of 1971 in the minors and was traded to the Cardinals after the season with Jim Bibby, Charlie Hudson and Art Shamsky for Jim Beauchamp, Chuck Tayor, Harry Parker and Chip Coulter.

He is probably best remembered for a line by the Padres' malaprop-prone broadcaster Jerry Coleman: “Rich Folkers is throwing up in the bullpen."

And I felt a little like hurling when I could find the card a several tables, but all in the $18 to $25 price range, which is far more than my budget would permit.
I found a table near the back of the room with a table covered with binders of cards from the 1960s and 1970s. I flipped through the 1971 book, and chatted with the friendly gentlemen working there, telling them that I was two cards short of completing the awesome set.

“We’ll get you there,” one of them said confidently, looking at my list. They were nice guys from North Carolina. I know this because reporters are nosey and chatty and I ask questions.

One of the men pulled the Cox, Gogolewski and Jones from a box for a very agreeable price, and I flipped to the page where No. 648 was supposed to be.

There it was, and in very nice shape. The 1971 set is famous for its black borders that scuff easily, making it tough to find in mint shape for people who demand such a thing. I just like having the cards, so I’m not as demanding. When I saw how nice this one looked, I expected it to be in a budget-busting range.

The gentleman looked up the card in the price guide, then looked over at me. “This is the last one you need?”

I nodded.

“How about $5?”

A little pricy for me, but I knew this was the best deal I was going to get anywhere.This was a gift, and I knew it. I threw my fists in the air, a slightly more reserved version of the infamous “Yes! Yes!” dance.

I handed him the cash and he handed me cards in a plastic sleeve.

“Hey, this guy just completed the 1971 set,” the gentleman said to one of partners.
“Congratulations! That’s quite a milestone.”

And it is.

You've seen the best, now look at the worst Mets cards -- if you dare!

We’ve spent the last couple months looking at the best Mets baseball cards. But its time to look at the flip side, and I don’t mean the place with all the stats.

For every 1986 there is a 1979. Opening Day is nearby, and before we turn away from cards we need to consider the very worst Mets cards offered up by Topps and some of the others companies.

Several things determine a bad card. I’ll allow companies to have an occasional off design, especially when they were issuing dozens of sets for a while.

And you are going to find some dull, lifeless photos. Not every player is Mr. Charisma.

But the ones that get my goat tend to be the cards that show a total lack of caring. We’ve seen great cards, so we know what the companies are capable of. But here’s what happens when they just stop giving a darn.

In year order:

1969 Tommie Agee

Agee played 132 games as a Met in 1968, 61 of them at Shea Stadium, a short drive from the Topps offices. So why does the company show Agee in an old photo in an air-brushed White Sox uniform? It’s not even a classic Topps headshot here, someone airbrushed the uniform. The 1969 set is notorious for its use of recycled photos, even for stars like Tom Seaver. But this just terrible. Tommy deserved better.


1972 Jim Beauchamp

I’ll forgive the airbrushing since Beauchamp arrived in 1972. But couldn’t the photo at least find a shot with his eyes open? It’s not like headshots are all that tough to shoot.


1981 Bill Almon

Hey, Topps photog. When you twist the lens on the front of the camera, you can actually bring things into focus. Brutal.


1983 Rick Ownbey

This is one of Topps best sets, and the design is intended to have a big action shot of a player and a small headshot in the inset. Ownbey appeared in only 8 games in 1982 and 10 in 1983, so I’m glad he has a card at all. But the inset is virtually the same size as the posed shot, and it’s clearly from another shot in the same roll.


1992 Donruss Vince Coleman

Somebody forget to tell the person cropping the photo that we’d rather have a complete Vince in the picture than the complete number 3. This is like a photo of the outfield wall that just happens to include Vice Coleman instead of the other way around.


1992 Topps Stadium Club Bill Pulsipher

Topps did the high school yearbook thing for a number of young players in this set and the Bowman set. I have no idea why. There are too many of these for it to be a fluke, with the company caught without a photo. And the glove shows that there was some thought in the pose. But the shirt, the hair and the off-camera glance make this the worst of a bad bunch.


1997 Fleer Metal Mark Clark

I’m not panning Fleer for trying something a little – well, a lot – different with the fantasy inspired Metal sets. Some of them are pretty cool in an odd kind of way. But it seems like they forgot to include Mark Clark in this Mark Clark card. I look at this and expect to see the stats for the fire-breathing monster on the back.


2004 Upper Deck Play Ball Jose Reyes

This is an artsy painting of Jose Reyes. I know this because it says “Jose Reyes” on the bottom, and not because the painting above bears even the slightest resemblance to our favorite shortstop.


2005 Donruss Champions Roger Cedeno

I’m using this one card to call attention to an entire set. This was a premium issue. I know the companies were looking for some niche audiences. This must be the set aimed at people who didn’t want photos of baseball players cluttering up their bland background baseball cards.


2005 Topps Gallery Kaz Matsui

I suspect this might have been a nice painting of Matsui before some intern left it out in the rain. I know, the Gallery cards where supposed to be artsy fartsy. This painting might even work as a program cover or something. But it’s not a baseball card.


2010 Topps National Chicle Nolan Ryan

I know it looks like I’m down on the art cards. That’s not true, as you can tell from the previous posts. But I’m down on bad art cards. I’d say that it’s nice Topps hired Mrs. Cooper’s third-graders to illustrate a set, but I don’t want to be unkind to third-graders. This looks more like John Maine than Nolan Ryan. Heck, it looks more like me than Nolan Ryan.

It's true, 'Tom Terrific' atop the Topps top 60

It’s not a surprise which baseball player will be depicted on the card deemed the greatest in Topps’ 60 years.

Even baseball writers, a difficult lot for sure, recognized Tom Seaver’s importance to the card collecting hobby and the sport itself. They enshrined him into the Baseball Hall of Fame with 98.84 percent of the vote, the closest any inductee has come to unanimity.

But Seaver appeared on many Topps cards during his spectacular 19-year career, as well as in a bunch of sets after his retirement. But they can’t all be No. 1.

We can immediately eliminate Seaver cards from when he played for lesser teams. Those are important cards, to be sure. Some of them appeared further down in the countdown. But Seaver as a member of the Sox, white or red, or an Ohio-based team wouldn’t be the way people remember him best.

And we can rule out any of the cards from retro sets, or sets that exist as an excuse to mix in jersey slice insert cards. Neither seems to be in the spirit of the countdown.

Leader and All-Star cards are to be enjoyed, and neat subsets like the “In-Action,” “Boyhood” and “Turn Back the Clock” are fun. But the No. 1 spot needs to be held by a base card.

That leaves a fairly small pool of cards from which to select. Let’s examine the pros of each, as well as the cons, slight as they might be, to determine our Topps champion.


1967:
Pros: The Seaver rookie is a nice card, and certainly his most expensive. It's the starting point to the magnificent career and it must give Bill Denehy a thrill to be linked forever with Tom Terrific.

Con: Bill Denehy is linked forever with Tom Terrific. Bill went 1-7 with the Mets in 1967, had three appearances with the Senators in 1968 and 0-3 with the Tigers in 1971. On the bright side, the Mets traded him to the Sens for Gil Hodges! But a card with Bill Denehy can’t claim the top spot.


1968:
Pros: We get a great headshot of Tom, who is full of youthful confidence. There is, perhaps, a slight annoyance to his glance. Some teammates might not be realizing that this losing crap isn’t cutting it. They need to straighten up, and this kid is going to lead them. Plus, we get the All-Star Rookie trophy and a funky burlap card design. The write-up on the back is wonderful.

Con: I don’t get the burlap/baseball connection. It’s the only thing holding this card back.


1969:
Pros: It’s a baseball card and it has Tom Seaver’s photo and it was released in 1969. That’s all I got.

Cons: Topps got lazy. How can it use the same photo of one of the game’s best players two years in a row? The design is dull, and the backs are pink.


1970:
Pros: A nice headshot of Tom, with another minimalist – but classy – design. As card No. 300, it was probably released after the start of the season, with the photo taken in spring training. Seaver looks relaxed, at the top of his game. He’s the reigning Cy Young Award winner; he’s got a World Series ring. The adorable Nancy is waiting at home. It’s good to be Tom Seaver.

Cons: Tom looks a little too relaxed. While it is, indeed, good be Tom Seaver, we still want to see a little edge there.


1971:
Pros: We finally get a pose that doesn’t looks like a yearbook photo with a baseball cap. The set is a classic, and we get Tom’s facsimile autograph, too!

Con: The card was from 1971, which was, perhaps, Tom’s greatest season. He went 20-10 with 21 complete games, and I don’t know how he possibly lost those 10 games considering his ERA was a freakish 1.76. You’d think this would mean Tom’s second Cy Young. But no, he lost to a Cub who had an ERA that was a FULL RUN higher. It’s not the card’s fault, but I still get all upset.


1973
Pros: A magnificent Seaver card, with Tom in a spring training faux-action pose, glove held high as if he was staring in for the signs. It looks scary, and this is just spring training. Tom that season went 19-10 with microscopic 2.08 ERA. And unlike 1971, voters recognized that wins aren’t always the best indicator of success and gave Tom the Cy over Ron Bryant and his 24 Giant victories.

Cons: The 1973 set is beloved, and with good reason. But the design is just a little bit too stark for me to put it on top.


1974:
Pros: Lots of firsts here. Its Tom’s first main card action card, and his first horizontal base card. Tom has just unleashed a laser and we can see John Milner in the background. And the 1974 set is one of my favorites.

Cons: As nice as the action shot is, there are Mets with just iconic cards in this set. The McGraw and the Harrelson are amazing portraits; the honked-off Rusty is great. Heck, they’re almost all great. If the Tom card isn’t the best on the team, it can’t be the best of all time.


1975:
Pros: I sent this card to Seaver when I was 11. I had doubles and thought he’d like to have a copy of his own card. It never occurred to me that he might already have one. I sent him a poem I composed – eat your heart out, Robert Frost – and asked for an autographed photo. Before long, an envelope came from New York National League Baseball Club, containing my autographed photo and the card I sent Tom, and it was signed, too. (Note the signature on the card above.)

Cons: This is a neat portrait of Tom leaning on the batting cage – there’s really not another Tom card like it – but his face is almost all in the shadows. Clearly this was meant to symbolize the previous season, when an injured Tom limped to an un-Seaverly 11-11. And because I tried to copy Seaver in every way, I spent half the summer complaining that I had injured the sciatic nerve in my left hip.


1976:
Pros: This card already checked in the top 60 at No. 41. Tom is in a classic spring training, baseball card pose. There might not even be a ball in his hand, but he’s probably not going to fire a pitch from the on-deck circle anyway. I remember pulling this card in the very first pack of cards I opened that year, and decided that I’d never have to buy another until 1977. That rule lasted maybe a day.

Cons: Having already checked in at No. 41, it can’t be in the running for the No. 1 card.


1977:
Pros: A terrific card. It’s very possibly Topps’ best Seaver action card. Any Mets fan would recognize that classic delivery and know that it’s Tom from a mile away. It’s an awesome design, and the colors are perfect. In fact, the entire card is nearly perfect.

Cons: Perfect, unless you count the blunt trauma caused by the June 15 midnight massacre that I’m still not even close to being over yet. I’m working on not overtly hating M. Donald Grant with an eye on eventually forgiving them. It’s a 40-year plan. We’re in the first week. Patience. Dick Young, you get no such forgiveness.


1983 traded
Pros: Tom’s exile is over, and that alone is a glorious thing. The design calls for two photos, an action shot and headshot for the inset. It’s a nice design, the colors are right, and Tom is back.

Cons: Despite all the potential glory here, the card just seems to be a little, well, lacking. The inset shot is better than the action shot. In fact, Topps used the headshot for subset cards and leader cards. The action shot is a bit dark and doesn’t look like Tom. We can’t see the team name or his No. 41. Overall, it looks like the kind of card Ray Searage would get, not the homecoming of the franchise hero.


1984
Pros: The 1984 card is every bit the celebration of Tom’s triumphant return that the 1983 card could have been. Seaver’s at home in the Mets pinstripes. And the bunting in the background reveals that the photo was, in fact, from April 5, 1983, the emotional Opening Day. Even the racing stripes, making their debut that day, look great. The design is fantastic, too, with the team name boldly running down the side, leading to a headshot. It is a fantastic reminder of Tom second tour.

Cons: There is but one slight fault. The card came out as part of the 1984 set, after Tom was swiped by the White Sox in the infamous Dennis Lamp Incident, and we’re not all the way over that, either. It’s a reminder of what we lost, again.

That would leave:

1972
Pros: There is much to love about this card. After several years of pretty tame designs, Topps got bolder with the 1971 set then embraced all that was the 1970s with the epic 1972 issue. It’s as if the stogy old guys in the design office were out for a week and the young upstarts took over. It’s a cross between art deco and Warhol pop art. It perfectly captures the time period.

Then you have the photo. Tom’s in his pinstripes and blue warm-up jacket. He’s pretending to be following through on a throw. But look at the eyes. The edge is back. Andy Pettitte only wishes he could look as imposing.

The shot is obviously from spring training, given the background with the distant palm trees and coach on one knee issuing instructions. Given that this is card No. 445, we can presume that the photo was taken that year.

The card back tells of the Cy Young injustice of 1971, and mentions Tom’s homer on June 24 to beat the Expos, 2-1. The h in “homered” is for some reason capitalized, but we can overlook that. The little cartoon tells us that Nelson Burbank as the scout who signed Seaver, giving me a reason to look for his photo in the yearbook.
And in a personal level, this was the first Tom Seaver card I ever possessed. It came in a trade with Jeff, parting with two Yankees to obtain the printed image of the hero.

Cons: None. This is perfection on cardboard. It’s a 2.5-inch by 3.5-inch reminder of all that is good in life. The design, the photo and the informational back perfectly capture the player and the era.

It is, without a doubt, the best card Topps has produced in its 60 years.

Topps countdown at No. 2 with 1970 card No. 1 and a miracle

The real miracle of the 1969 Miracle Mets, in my mind, isn’t that the team won the World Series.

It’s the relative ease by which the team dispatched both the slugging Atlanta Braves in the playoffs and then the mighty Baltimore Orioles in the Series.

Keep in mind; the Mets were a 100-to-1 shot to win the World Series before the start of the season. And despite the growing collection of young talent and able vets, the team had not yet to post a winning record.

Topps showed the team the love it deserved with the spectacular card No. 1 in the 1970 set, the team photo with World Champions above the players.

The photo itself is a little odd. It’s in the Shea outfield, but shot slightly from the side, with most of the players looking to the center, where there must have been another photographer. Why not use the official photo? And check out the ball and glove on the ground in the middle, between Rube Walker and Yogi Berra. Someone was getting a little artsy.

Topps did a nice job with both of the postseason subsets, too. The key moments were captured, and there are two celebration cards.

Not that Braves fans have anything to remember their team’s appearance in the playoffs. Topps used a great photo of Tom Seaver for Game 1, Ken Boswell approaching home after his two-run blast for Game 2 and highlighted Nolan Ryan’s relief appearance for the Game 3 card. The celebration card – with “We’re number one!” shows Wayne Garrett, Ryan, Tommie Agee and, I think, Tug McGraw, just out of the shower.







The Mets were a team built around pitching, but the team scored a whopping 27 runs in the three-game sweep. Braves fans certainly can’t fault Hank Aaron, who launched three two-run homers in the series.


The opposition does make an appearance in the World Series subset. The Game 1 card shows Don Buford heading back to the dugout after the home run he smacked off Seaver to start the game.

But, as Terry Cashman croons, “they made a believer of Mr. Earl Weaver in four games straight.”


The Game 2 card shows Donn Clendenon crossing home after his fourth-inning home run. Game 3’s card appropriately shows off Tommie Agee, depicting the first of his two spectacular catches.


Game 4 shows J.C. Martin’s controversial bunt that pushed across the winning run in the tenth inning. Personally, I’d rather have a horizontal card of Ron Swoboda’s dive, but I can’t complain.


The Game 5 card shows Jerry Koosman “shutting the door,” but that game had enough heroes and highlights that it could have filled a subset of its own, with Cleon Jones’ shoe, Al Weis’ only Shea homer or the big hits from Swoboda and Clendenon.


The “World Series Celebration” card – with “Mets whoop it up” as the caption – is an epic to itself. It’s a scene of clubhouse chaos. Note that Ed Charles still looks stunned that the team pulled it off, holding up an “Amazing Mets” album that came out earlier in the summer. Ed Kranepool and Tug McGraw look gleeful, and I can’t figure out which Met is mugging for the camera in the foreground. Jerry Grote or Swoboda, perhaps? But look behind Charles, as a group of stern looking reporters are interviewing someone off camera.


The whole subset is the highlight on one of Topps’ best sets, but it didn’t get much better that card No. 1.

Topps top 60, No. 3: Magical Mookie Wilson

No. 3, 1985 Mookie Wilson


Just try it. Think about Mookie Wilson and not smile.

Oh, sure. Bob Stanley and Bill Buckner might grimace a little.

But everyone else sure seems to have fond memories of the fleet centerfielder with the mega-watt grin.

Even the nickname bestowed on William Heyward Wilson by his grandmother kind of forces the mouth into a smile just by saying it.

Mookie arrived in 1980 when the Mets were still in what Glenn Close called “the quiet years” in the video. It’s only fitting that he was not only still there for the championship, but will be forever linked with its most famous moment.

Every Mets fan knows this by heart. Game Six, tenth inning, Mets down a run. Bob Costas in the Sox clubhouse, Jean Yawkey already fingering the World Series trophy.
After fouling off three pitches, Stanley threw a wild one that Mookie was able to avoid, bringing Kevin Mitchell home with the tying run.

After fouling back several more, Mookie slapped one up the first base line, where it magically got through Buckner’s legs, bringing home Ray Knight.

Get off Buckner’s case. Even if he had come up with the ball, Stanley wasn’t close enough to first to make the play and Mookie’s speed would have placed him there first anyway.

That’s because there’s magic in Mookie, and that at-bat couldn’t have happened to any other player.

He left the team in 1989 in a trade for Jeff Musselman, but Mookie still is ranked second in steals and triples, fourth in at-bats, sixth in games, hits and runs and 10th in doubles.

Here’s how unassuming Mookie Wilson is. He has a commercial drivers’ license because he thought he’d be a truck driver after retiring.

Not a chance. He’s been with the Mets most of the time since, and this year he’ll be back in uniform as the first base coach.

There are many great Mets cards in the 1985 set. The Mookie, which shows him flashing that famous grin, is my favorite.

Topps all-time countdown continues with Jose Reyes, swiping spot No. 5

No. 5, 2010 Jose Reyes

Is there a player on the Mets who will be watched more closely in 2011 than Jose Reyes?

When Reyes is at his healthy best, he’s the most exciting player in the game. And spacious Citi Field is practically designed to allow players with speed like Reyes to run wild.

Jose already is the team’s all-time leader in stolen bases, with his 331 swipes are way ahead of Mookie Wilson’s 281.

But look at the triples. Reyes has 83. Mookie has 62. The player in third place has 45, a little more than half of Reyes’ total. That player, by the way, is Bud Harrelson, and I wouldn’t have guessed that.

But the nearest active player is Angel Pagan with 19, or No. 13 on the all-time list. Now, that speaks highly of Angel, who has only been on the team for parts of three seasons. But it also means that Reyes is putting that record out of reach.

As the Mets debate whether to trade Reyes in is walk year or lock him up in a long-term deal, Sandy Alderson is going to be looking for more scenes like the one depicted on Reyes’ 2010 card.

Jose has just slid head first into third base. A bewildered Marlin is looking in vain to see if he got the call. But he knows the result. The umpire is making it clear for everyone else in the stadium.

Given the distance from the action and the number of people in the shot, the card recalls the glories of the 1971 set. Though a true '71 action classic would have included two more players, the third base coach and possibly a hot dog vendor.

About the only thing marring the scene is the awful Citi Field inaugural season patch. But we can live with that.

Topps all-time top 60 card No. 6, Doc Gooden and the 'Streak of Shame'

Dwight Gooden is blessed to have numerous outstanding Topps cards, but there are two that are particularly special, for different reasons.

First is the 1986 base set card, with a photo from the 1985 season when Gooden compiled what can only be described as one of the best pitching performances ever by a Met, going 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA, 16 complete games and eight shutouts.


This was Gooden when he was all magic and potential, focused and raring back.

But I’m favoring a 1992 Stadium Club card, and Doc isn’t even pitching. He’s rounding third base, about the score the Mets’ eighth run. It’s the bottom of the third, 3:02 p.m. and sweltering hot.

The time and the score are evident from the photo, but I know first-hand about the heat. Will and I were there, watching that game from the Shea press box.

The Mets eventually won that game 9-4, beating the Dodgers and former 1986 Mets heroes Darryl Strawberry and Bob Ojeda.

It would be the last time I’d see the Mets win in person for 17 years, a streak of shame that lasted until an incredible afternoon at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati in 2008.

For a long time, that Stadium Club was more than a great, non-traditional action shot. With my press pass, it was a reminder of an incredible day at Shea – and the last time I thought I’d see the team win a game.